The "Harry vs. You" ad accuses Reid of "making a million dollars from a sweetheart land deal," while on screen we see a quote attributed to the Associated Press: "Harry Reid collected a $1.1 million windfall on a Las Vegas land sale even though he hadn’t personally owned the property for three years." The second ad, "Public Servant," opens by asking, "How did Harry Reid get so wealthy on a public servant’s income?" The screen cuts to a clip of Reid from his Oct. 14 debate with Angle, in which he says: "I did a very good job of investing." The narrator snaps back, "Really? Like the shady deal where Reid made an astronomical million bucks doing nothing."

AP did call the transaction a "windfall" for Reid, but it didn’t call it a "sweetheart" deal or a "shady" one, and the evidence that it was either of those is lacking. There’s also no basis for the second ad’s implication of corruption on Reid’s part.

The AP’s story about Reid’s land transactions with his friend Jay Brown came out in 2006. According to the article, Reid bought what the AP called "undeveloped residential property on Las Vegas’ booming outskirts" in 1998 for about $400,000, and bought a second, adjacent parcel jointly with Brown, a former casino lawyer. In 2001, Reid sold the first parcel for the same price to a holding company that Brown created, AP said. Then in 2004, Brown’s company sold the land to other developers, and Reid got $1.1 million of the proceeds. So according to the records that AP looked at, it seemed as though Reid got his $400,000 back when he sold the land to the company in 2001, and also got $1.1 million on top of that when the company sold the land several years later, even though he no longer owned it.

On top of that, AP reported, Reid never disclosed on his Senate financial disclosure statement the 2001 sale of the land to the holding company, and when he collected the $1.1 million in 2004, he reported it on that year’s statement as a sale of land he owned personally.

Reid’s office, however, said no money changed hands when Reid transferred the land to the holding company in 2001; instead, Reid got an ownership stake in the company equal to the value of his land. If true, that means Reid didn’t get paid for the property until the company sold it in 2004, when he received nearly triple what he paid for it originally. Reed’s aides said he continued to pay taxes on the property and didn’t disclose the change in ownership because he considered it a "technical transfer."

Reid asked the Senate Ethics Committee whether he should amend his annual financial disclosure statements to reflect what had actually happened with the land. Then several days later, without waiting for a response from the panel, Reid did adjust his disclosure statement to reflect the circumstances of the land transfer, and also reported two much smaller land deals that had previously been unknown to the public. That pretty much put an end to press stories about the deal, until the matter was recently revived by the Angle campaign.

Collecting a profit of almost twice the original investment may indeed qualify as a "windfall." Many who bought land in Las Vegas as the real estate bubble swelled during this time had similar good fortune. But was it a "sweetheart land deal," as one of Angle’s ads claims, or a "shady deal," as the other one says? The AP story contains no interviews with witnesses or any other information that indicates anything fishy took place, only that there was a discrepancy between records in Nevada and Reid’s Senate financial disclosure statement on this parcel of land. Reid was never charged with any ethics or legal violations, nor – at least according to public records – was he even investigated in connection with the matter.

Reid’s most recent financial disclosure statement and his previous ones list numerous pieces of property, mining patents, municipal bonds, mutual funds and other investments he’s made over the years. There’s no public record that questions have been raised by ethics or law enforcement bodies about his handling of any of them — and certainly nothing to justify the implication in Angle’s ad that Reid took advantage of his position as a public servant to get rich.

Harry Reid worked in the private sector for just 3 years and has amassed millions while in government employment. Many of us work hard every day for our meager living while this man has lived high on the hog at the expense of the taxpayers. Special interest money bought and paid for him and many others in all parties over his lifetime. May his reign soon end! Wake up and quit allowing the politicians to play this us vs them game. When you fall for their game, no matter the party, it is like the shell game: They get you to look at each other instead of them!

Mid 90s... BLM transfer of land to Del Webb... front page of the WSJ and all of page a2. You appear prejudiced, Robison. That's just one deal... how about the old south Tahoe deals... Hasert's is a scumbag so is Reid.

This is just another example of the GOP strategy to muddy the waters by accusing Democrats of misdoings that they themselves are doing. This muddies the waters and lowers the debate to a case of he said, she said. Cutting Medicare and deliberately trying to sabotage the economy are just two more recent examples of a myriad of such cases.

Hitler said: “Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it”.

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Fact Checker columns by Mark Robison are rated on a scale from 0 to 10, with 10 being absolutely true with no gray area, 5 being down the middle with good points by both sides, 1 being false with no gray area and 0 being intentionally, maliciously or foolishly false.

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